Over the summer, my family from “back East” visited Vancouver for the first time since I moved here. For me, this presented a unique challenge … both as a host and as a travel writer. Vancouver in itself is beautiful, but the vast province of British Columbia – bigger than France and Italy put together – is the real attraction. The scenery extends from coastal islands with an almost Mediterranean feel to glacier-topped mountain ranges, interior deserts, and canyons and grasslands straight out of an American Western. But how was I going to show all this off – or at least some it – in just a week or so. In the end, I tried to follow the wise traveler’s maxim: Do half as much and you’ll enjoy it twice as much.

An Ultimate British Columbia Week

By Remy Scalza for the Vancouver Sun
Published Sept. 5, 2015(For the online version of the article on the Vancouver Sun website, click here)

Who knew a $3.50 ticket for the Aquabus could buy so many Vancouver memories?

I’m packed into one of the brightly coloured water taxis with my family from back East, here visiting me — and British Columbia — for the first time.

The little ferry putters its way across False Creek, dodging multimillion-dollar yachts and tiny sailboats, en route to Granville Island. It’s old hat for me. But my mom and sister have whipped out iPhones and are madly snapping shots of the city skyline, Burrard Bridge and sleepy-eyed cormorants floating by on the waves. Dad even gets wrangled into posing for a selfie or two with the rest of us.

It’s Day 1 of their weeklong vacation. And for me it’s the first day of a serious dilemma: How do I show off the best of British Columbia — or at least this corner of it — in just seven days? As a transplant to Vancouver, it’s taken me years to soak up the mountains, deserts, wine country, islands and canyons in this part of Canada — and I’ve only scratched the surface.

But, at least tonight, I’m following rule No. 1 of vacation hosting — keep ’em well fed. Instead of racing around the city, we take a slow walk past the Granville Island Public Market, past the picturesquely out-of-place cement factory with its towering silos, to one of the prettiest patios in the city — Dockside Restaurant. Tables cluster around outdoor fireplaces near the water’s edge, while boats at anchor bob in the inlet below.

And the food’s not bad either. Chili squid, Haida Gwaii halibut, albacore tuna, fresh sablefish with citrus glaze; the kind of seafood bounty Vancouverites take for granted and people from … well, just about anywhere else … go absolutely gaga over.

As we tuck in, the setting sun shoots a few rays our way, turning False Creek glittering shades of orange and gold.

Afterward, I drop the family off at the Opus Hotel in the historic Yaletown district. Tucked amid century-old brick warehouses, it’s got a neighbourhood feel missing at some of the bigger chains, but doesn’t skimp on style … even when that means raising a few eyebrows. Guest bathrooms famously feature floor-to-ceiling windows — and not the one-way glass kind — that look out onto the street below. I leave Mom and Dad with a firm warning to stay well robed and say good night.

Exploring Vancouver’s back yard

Our plan is to get out of town, but I’d be betraying my home city if I didn’t steer my family to a few local highlights first. The next day is spent getting up close and personal with the belugas in the Vancouver Aquarium, trolling the designer stores on Robson Street and pounding the cobblestones in Gastown.

For a little more adventure, we cross to the North Shore for one of the city’s true natural gems. Just a short drive past the tour buses (and $36 admission fees) at a certain suspension bridge is the free Capilano River Regional Park. We hike through remnants of old-growth forest, working our way along well-marked trails deep into the gorge. Down at the open-air fish hatchery, wild salmon are putting on a show, churning their way up the fish ladder en route to their spawning grounds. It ends up being a long day, but the camera memory cards are full and no one’s grumbling … yet.

However, here’s where things get tricky. One must-see on any B.C. vacation is the Gulf Islands — the hundreds of wild, forested isles, both big and small, strung through the Strait of Georgia. But our time is limited and even a simple jaunt to Victoria on Vancouver Island can take a full day. In a compromise, the following morning we hop aboard a BC Ferries vessel for a quick cruise to the next best thing, Bowen Island: just 20 minutes from Vancouver but, in every other respect, a world away.

Tiny Snug Cove is bustling with boat and ferry traffic when we pull in. After walking through the village — dotted with pubs and little restaurants — we strike out for Dorman Point, a rocky bluff reached by a two-kilometre hike. The trail turns steep quickly, with huge ferns and massive Douglas firs giving the forest an almost primeval feel.

Up top, a grove of arbutus trees — gorgeous red bark peeling in long strips — overhangs a cliff that drops straight down to the water.

To cool off after the hike, we hop in the car and make a quick beeline across the island to what may be one of the Lower Mainland’s last “undiscovered” beaches (notice the scare quotes): Cape Roger Curtis. Until recently, the entire area — some 650 acres and four kilometres of coastline — was undeveloped. (A new, high-end housing complex is changing things, but beaches remain relatively pristine for now.)

We slide down a steep trail to a broad crescent of pebble beach. Apart from a lone sunbather, we have the coast and the brisk Pacific Ocean water here entirely to ourselves.

Mountain living, B.C. style

But the clock is ticking. With five days left, we could strike out north for the mountains of Whistler or venture to the vast, rolling Cariboo Country beyond or even hopscotch our way up the Sunshine Coast. But for that ideal mix of B.C. scenery and culture, of jaw-dropping landscapes and creature comforts — all in a tight time frame — I think there’s really only way to go: east toward the Okanagan Lake and wine country.

After a five-hour drive on Highway 1, then up and over the mountains of Manning Park on the white-knuckle Crowsnest Highway, the family is getting a little stir crazy. But our first stop isn’t far. I pull off the highway just before the fruit-stand town of Keremeos and follow a dirt road to our destination: the dusty parking lot that serves as base camp for Cathedral Lakes Lodge.

A few thousand metres straight up the mountainside is what’s billed as Canada’s highest full-service wilderness lodge — a complex of cabins situated in the middle of 80,000-acre Cathedral Provincial Park and surrounded by a half-dozen mountain lakes. Getting there, however, won’t be easy. We pack into the lodge’s beat-up Chevy Suburban with a few other guests for the hour-long ascent up a rutted dirt road.

The incline is so severe that I’m actually pegged back in my seat by gravity, managing only to steal occasional glimpses through the window at the sheer drop-offs below.

Up top, at 2,100 metres above sea level, we step out to a different world. The air is crisper and clearer and the silence is absolute — no cars, no planes, no cellphones. The modest camp, powered almost completely by solar energy on sunny summer days, is encircled by a ridge of jagged mountains stretching from horizon to horizon. Pine and spruce grow in thick colonnades and, out front, the light glints off a lake clear as glass.

The clanging of a dinner bell brings 50 or so guests out of cabins, off surrounding trails and into the lodge. Inside, we find anything but camp food: A lavish spread of salads and soups, pork loin with fresh beets, even a passable flan. Afterward, we retreat to our bungalow — a few simple bedrooms around a common area — where Dad makes himself handy, managing to coax a fire from the woodstoves. We call it an early night — a good thing considering what lies ahead.

“It is nothing. Anyone can do it. You cannot get lost,” insists Cedric, our French-accented host at the lodge, when I ask him the next morning about an ambitious-looking, all-day hike that climbs several hundred metres onto the ridge. Reassured — sort of — we set out, huffing and puffing for an hour through thick forest to turquoise-hued Glacier Lake. From there, the going gets a little rough. High above the tree line, we scramble up stretches of scree, hunting for stone cairns that mark the path. The last, nearly vertical stretch is conquered on all fours and with no shortage of cursing at Cedric.

But it’s worth it. The view from the knife’s edge of the ridge is an uninterrupted panorama stretching literally hundreds of square miles — west into the Cascades, south to the looming cones of Mount Baker and Mount Rainier and east to the Okanagan and Kootenays beyond. On the descent, as if on cue, mountain goats amble out and pose in front of a Caribbean-blue lake.

A taste of the Okanagan

After two nights “roughing it” in the B.C. wilderness, we’re in the home stretch and ready for some R & R. We careen back down the mountain and pile into the car for a short drive to our last stop: Osoyoos, the South Okanagan hot spot famous for its desert scenery and invitingly warm lake. In town, we cruise past mini golf courses and lakefront motels on Main Street, then wind through vineyards and orchards to our hotel, situated on a secluded ridge outside town.

A collection of elegant, adobe-style buildings set high above Osoyoos Lake, Spirit Ridge turns out to be a perfect family option. We pile into a three-bedroom suite — with full kitchen and, a true luxury, a trio of bathrooms — and open the patio doors to soak up the view: rows of vines stretching down to the lake and dry foothills covered with sagebrush and lavender.

After almost a solid week together — in the plane, the car and the hotels — the family desperately needs some “me” time. Luckily, there’s plenty of distraction within walking distance. Literally steps from our room is Canada’s first aboriginal-owned winery, NK’Mip. My wife and I escape for a tasting, sampling everything from fruit-forward Pinot Noirs to big Bordeaux blends for the bargain price of $3 a person. Mom and Dad poke into the NK’Mip Desert Cultural Centre just next door. Displays inside highlight a traditional First Nations pit house and indigenous art from the early 1900s, while interpretive trails wind deep into the desert (just watch for rattlesnakes). My sister meanwhile, camps out at the hotel pool, catching up on a tan and a week’s worth of texting.

At night, we reconvene back in the suite for dinner, family-style — salmon and burgers on the barbecue, Okanagan veggies sliced and diced into a salad and sweet local corn. Uncorking a bottle of B.C. wine (or two), we dig into the fitting 100-mile feast. Just outside, little kids are getting in a few last runs on the pool’s water slide. The sky is fading to nighttime shades of blue and purple. We may not have seen all of the province, but we’ve had a B.C. week to remember. And the most amazing part: We’re all still talking.

Whistler, Canada, roughly two hours outside of Vancouver, has a reputation for being one of North America’s top ski towns. A pair of glacier-capped mountains draws skiers and snowboarders from around the world for incredibly long and – in some cases – incredibly challenging runs. Not surprisingly, Whistler is also incredibly expensive. The lift ticket alone is more than $100. Throw in accommodation and restaurants – generally geared toward well heeled international visitors – and a weekend on the slopes with the family can easily set you back a few thousand dollars. I tried to find a cheaper way to experience Whistler, leaning heavily on advice from the local ski and snowboard bums.

Whistler’s Slopes and Après-Ski Charms, the Cheap Way

By Remy Scalza for The New York Times
Published Feb. 25, 2015(For the online version of the article on The New York Times website, click here)

A few weeks back, in a bid to cut costs on a ski trip to Whistler, the ritzy Canadian resort town near Vancouver, I had booked one of the cheapest options I could find: a yurt. For the uninitiated, a yurt is kind of like a big tent, but with a wood floor and actual beds. This one, at a private campground and R.V. park outside town, was going for 99 Canadian dollars a night ($80 at 1.23 Canadian dollars to the U.S. dollar), not exactly dirt cheap but a relative steal considering hotel rooms were starting at twice as much. I’d bring a sleeping bag, I told myself. There was a little stove inside to keep warm. It would be just like camping — glamping even.

But as I stepped out of my car in Whistler to a light snow and chilly breeze, I was having second thoughts about spending a weekend of subzero nights sleeping, for all intents and purposes, in the great outdoors. So when the front desk at the Riverside Resort campground explained that my yurt wasn’t ready and I’d been upgraded at no cost to a mini cabin — a handsome little red-cedar number with a bathroom, queen bed, electricity and heat — I didn’t protest. There’s a point when frugality yields diminishing returns, and I was starting to think a yurt in winter might be past that point.

But, for travelers on a tight budget, Whistler does demand some extreme measures. Most ski towns are pricey. Whistler is in a league of its own, a likely consequence of being named North America’s top resort for most of the last 20 years by a bevy of glossy ski magazines, not to mention hosting an Olympics a few years back. (It was also the subject of a recent 36 Hours column by The Times, which highlighted some of its less frugal charms.) Yes, the skiing is extraordinary: two separate mountains (Whistler and Blackcomb); 8,000-odd acres of skiable terrain; a mile-long vertical drop on the longest of runs. But none of that comes cheap. (I should note, however, that the recent free fall of the Canadian loonie means international visitors do get substantial savings in the exchange.) An adult, full-day lift ticket, which just gets you on the slopes, is 119 Canadian dollars (15 dollars less if you buy in advance online). On my budget, that meant I’d be able to afford one day of skiing, at most, over the weekend, and I’d need to scrimp and save to manage even that.

Fortunately, while Whistler does attract its share of international high rollers, it’s also home to a sizable and decidedly different demographic: young, seasonal employees perpetually strapped for cash, many on work visas from Australia or Britain, who know how and where to find deals. To get the lowdown, I dropped my things at the cabin and headed back into town to meet a friend of a friend.

“When you’re making minimum wage, you make every dollar count,” explained my drinking companion, Jonny, a 19-year-old Justin Bieber look-alike who came to Whistler two years ago from England to teach skiing and snowboarding. His shirt read, “All I care about is snowboarding … and maybe 3 people and beer,” a claim confirmed by our conversation. In quick succession, I learned his views on where to find the cheapest pitchers of beer (Creekbread, a pizza joint outside the village), the cheapest shots (Three Below, a bar under a movie theater) and which clubs hosted discounted “locals’ nights” during the week.

Eventually, I pressed Jonny for a non-alcohol-related tip. “Well, there’s nature,” he said and gave me directions to the Whistler Interpretive Forest, a 7,500-acre spread with plenty of trails, just a short drive south of town. A few minutes later, I was hiking my way through a thick swath of towering Douglas fir and Western red cedar trees, boughs draped with hanging moss. A mile on, the trail opened to a wobbly suspension bridge strung above the Cheakamus River, a ribbon of bright turquoise — that luminous glacial hue you get only in mountain country — threading through a frosty white canyon. It was something straight out of an enchanted forest, and I had the scene all to myself.

Chilled from the walk, I set my sights on getting into a hot tub, one way or another. My little cabin backed onto a gorgeous outdoor spa – a complex of hot and cold pools, Finnish saunas and steam rooms set on manicured grounds. Unfortunately, the price of admission turned out to be 58 dollars. But across the street at the municipalMeadow Park Sports Center, run by the local park board, I discovered that access to a hot tub, sauna and steam room would cost me just 8.25 dollars. I happily shelled out an extra 3 dollars for a towel and a locker token.

Being a Canadian community center, Meadow Park was actually nicer than a lot of private clubs I’d been to. I made my way past the indoor hockey rink and the squash courts to the pool area, which, as promised, had a nice big hot tub in the corner. When it got a little too crowded with 12-year-olds, I retreated to the steam room, where I made friends with a young snowboarder convalescing for the season after suffering a broken leg. “Mind if I add a little eucalyptus?” he asked, then sprinkled a few drops of his own oil onto the steam vent — a frugal spa trick worth remembering.

The next day dawned rainy, so I decided to defer hitting the slopes and explore instead. To get a sense of Whistler’s past — before the resort, before even the first trappers and prospectors set up shop in the late 1800s — I drove to the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Center, a museum dedicated to the history of the region’s indigenous population, tucked among a cluster of five-star hotels on the village edge (at 18 dollars, a modest splurge but a worthwhile one). Heavy carved wooden doors opened to a big open room filled with full-size totem poles and cedar canoes.

On a guided tour, I learned that the Squamish and Lil’wat peoples had inhabited the areas around Whistler for thousands of years. We popped into full-scale models of an underground pit house and a huge cedar-timbered longhouse. Exhibits showed off traditional goat’s-wool blankets and nifty waterproof hats woven from cedar bark, essential accessories back in the day. My favorite piece was a giant, menacing mask of Kalkalalh, the wild witch woman of the woods, who ate children and had a serious case of bed head, wild hair splaying everywhere.

The rain hadn’t let up, so I decided to go for a drive. While Whistler is a slickly manufactured ski resort masquerading as a quaint mountain town, the nearby community of Pemberton really is a quaint mountain town, home to a few thousand back-to-the-land types, hard-core adventure seekers, farmers and retirees. After a harrowing ride — freezing rain had turned the winding Sea-to-Sky Highway into a bobsled run — I eased down to a grid of streets set in the shadow of some dizzying peaks. Just off the main drag, a line of cars was snaking its way up to the local high school. I pulled off to investigate.

Inside the gym — home of the Pemberton Red Devils — a craft fair was in progress, evidently the event of the season. I worked my way through the masses, past rows of folding tables packed with homemade preserves, church bake sale cookies, local alpaca blankets and cure-all salves sold by members of the nearby Mount Currie Indian Band. I ended up buying a few jars of homemade salsa for 4 dollars each from a local canning enthusiast, who upsold me on a wool cap with ear flaps that had been knit by her mother. “Perfect for wearing underneath a hardhat,” she said.

Farther up the road, in an unlikely spot in an industrial park, I found what just might be the country’s only certified-organic potato vodka distillery. “Pemberton’s known for potatoes, and we go through at least 100,000 pounds a year,” said Tyler Schramm, the distiller, pouring me a sample of his trademark spirit inside the tasting room, essentially a cinder-block and sheet-metal shack. Afterward, we poked into the distillery itself, where a batch of organic potato absinthe was being bottled, and sprigs of wormwood, the spirit’s key ingredient, were spread out to dry. With a long drive ahead of me, I decided against a taste, but I couldn’t resist picking up a handsome, hand-labeled bottle of potato gin on the way out (45 dollars, which is in no way frugal, but it was worth every penny).

Back in Whistler, the lifts had closed for the day, sending a flood of skiers onto the streets for après-ski sustenance. On a tip, I skipped the usual bars and pubs and headed to the kind of place budget travelers rarely dare to tread, a fine-dining fixture called Bearfoot Bistro. Inside, there’s a grand piano in the dining room, a walk-in 20,000-bottle wine cellar and prix fixe menu pushing 100 dollars a head. But from 3 to 7 p.m. daily, they also have one of the best après-ski deals in town: a half-dozen local Vancouver Island oysters, served with fresh horseradish and red wine mignonette, for 10 dollars. I felt a bit underdressed in my muddy boots and ski jacket, but I found a seat at the bar and started happily slurping away.

Alas, one cannot live on oysters alone. Whistler is sorely lacking the kind of homey hole-in-the-walls where budget travelers usually find their best meals. But back along the main pedestrian stroll, a sandwich board outside a place called El Furniture Warehouse caught my eye: “All Food — $4.95.” It was a risk, but I was hungry.

Inside, the Warehouse was much as advertised: dark and low-ceilinged with young ski and snowboard bums packed into every possible corner. But my “Works Burger” (Alberta beef, maple bacon and Cheddar for the promised price of 4.95 dollars) held its own against pub burgers that cost three times as much, and 5-dollar Kokanee drafts (British Columbia’s equivalent of Budweiser or Coors) made the pounding club mix inside easier to bear. To cap off the night, I stopped in at the Dubh Linn Gate, a nearby pub with a bit more atmosphere than the standard Irish knockoff. No cover charge and a foot-stomping fiddle band called Team Hewitt meant the place was packed. I squeezed onto the dance floor, a sea of swirling flannels, just in time for the start of a Celtic treatment of “Folsom Prison Blues.”

The next morning, the skies were still threatening rain, but it was now or never for skiing. I ponied up for the lift ticket, shuffled into the Village Gondola — the main route up Whistler Mountain — and hoped for the best. Inside, two snowboarders from Washington were literally fidgeting in their seats — “super stoked,” they said, for their first runs of the year.

Then, just as I was reconciling myself to a damp day on the slopes, the gondola broke through the low clouds, emerging on the other side to an unexpectedly gorgeous vista. Row after row of jagged, snowcapped mountains — hidden from sight all weekend — spiked upward against a backdrop of blue sky and puffy white clouds. Above it all glowered the fang of Blackcomb Mountain — 8,010 feet high and sheathed in glacier.

I got out of the gondola a half-hour later, the better part of a mile above Whistler. While the snow up top wasn’t exactly fresh powder (uncommonly warm temperatures this season have made for challenging skiing conditions), the sun was shining, and the uninterrupted panorama of peaks and bowls was enough to banish any buyer’s remorse over my ticket. Whistler isn’t a beginner’s mountain, which meant I spent most of the afternoon on the easiest, green runs. Still — in fear-induced adrenaline alone — I got my money’s worth. Next time I think I’d even make the sacrifice and stay in that yurt, if it meant an extra day on the mountain.

As a travel journalist, you’re always a bit of an imposter. You’re generally tasked with going into a place you know very little about, spending a few days there and then writing about it as if you’re an expert. If you do your research and rely heavily on local sources for input it’s possible to pull this off … at least some of the time. But recently I faced the opposite dilemma. I was asked to write an article about a place I knew almost too much about – New York’s Hudson Valley. I grew up in the region. I still return every year. The challenge suddenly became how to compress a lifetime of knowledge about a place into just a thousand or so words, not to mention how to write a story that would resonate not just with outsiders but with people in the region itself.

A Midwinter Playground in the Hudson Valley

By Remy Scalza for The New York Times
Published Feb. 11, 2015(For the online version of the article on The New York Times website, click here)

On a cold January night, all seven tables inside the Grange, a restaurant housed in a 1903 former post office in the Hudson Valley town of Warwick, were full. In dutiful farm-to-fork fashion, the evening’s specials, written on a big chalkboard on one wall, were tagged with the names of local farms: Hudson Valley Cattle Company beef, Hillery Farms chicken, Meadowburn Cheddar. Exposed beams and brick and a waitress with thick black glasses and hair done up in a head scarf completed the scene — a tableau common in so many city restaurants but somewhat less expected here, in what used to be my humble little hometown.

Yet as I discovered on a recent trip back to my Hudson Valley roots, times have changed. What haven’t, by and large, are the prices. Despite its proximity to New York, this historic swath of the lower Hudson Valley is still a bargain, especially in the winter low season. A local food movement, atmospheric inns dating back hundreds of years and a formidable expanse of state parks and ski mountains make for a frugal paradise within easy reach of one of the country’s most expensive cities.

Dinner at the Grange (roasted cauliflower soup with house-made croutons; a flatiron steak from a ranch a few towns over) was excellent. But since the restaurant had yet to get a liquor license, after paying the check I was primed for a drink. Luckily, my hotel for the night, just a mile or so down the road, had both a bar and an extensive wine list.

Built in the 1800s as a private residence, Chateau Hathorn has a turret roof, a grand ballroom done up in mahogany and oak, and a 12,000-bottle walk-in wine cellar. Restored in recent decades after an unfortunate stint as a dude ranch, it still needs a bit of work but otherwise oozes great spooky-mansion ambience. A room with its own fireplace cost me $135, not exactly frugal but worth the splurge.

I dropped my bags upstairs before heading back down to the hotel restaurant for a nightcap. Up at the big hardwood bar, I ordered a nice Bordeaux and polished off a plate of old-fashioned oysters Rockefeller ($14.50) before climbing the creaking stairs and making my way down a long, dark hallway to my room.

The next day, I set out for Orange County’s original shopping mecca, though by no means its best known. That distinction belongs to Woodbury Common, the sprawling, high-end outlet mall that attracts 13 million visitors a year. Just a few miles up Route 17, however, is the antithesis of that anonymous outlet experience — the traditional crafts village of Sugar Loaf.

Along a single street lined with 18th-century houses, a dozen or so local artists — goldsmiths, soap makers, wood carvers, glassblowers, leather workers — make and sell wares out of their homes. I stopped into the Candle Shop, where one of the village’s craft pioneers still lives and works.

“Forty-six years here — it’s a lifetime, man,” said Peter Lendved, who had a graying ponytail and spoke in long digressions about Sugar Loaf’s past: royalist refuge during the American Revolution, secret Underground Railroad stop, hippie hot spot during the ’60s arts and crafts renaissance. As I was leaving, he discreetly wrapped one of his candles — which go for $9 and come in just one, vanilla-based scent — in a piece of tissue paper and handed it to me as a gift, wishing me the best on my life’s journey.

After stocking up on hand-cured soaps and loose-leaf teas, and making a quick pit stop in the nearby Warwick Valley Winery (great ciders, but skip the wine), I was ready to get outdoors. The low, rounded spine of the Appalachian Mountains cuts through Orange County, which makes for great hiking in summer and decent skiing in winter, at least when nature cooperates.

As I drove down a dirt road to Mount Peter, a family-run ski center in Warwick, the ground was ominously bare, but a haze of artificial snow hung over the mountain. Opened in 1936, partly to serve as a backdrop for Macy’s to show off winter fashions, Mount Peter claims to be the oldest operating ski mountain in the state and — lucky for me — was an early adopter of snow-making technology.

Though ski pros are likely to be underwhelmed — maximum vertical drop on Peter’s dozen or so runs is just a few hundred feet — for a beginner like me, the modest slopes were a perfect fit. And the price is right: Weekday lift tickets are $25 and rentals are just $30. I hopped on the Hailey’s Comet chairlift and rode to the peak, watching below as little kids snowplowed their way straight down the mountain.

I spent the afternoon working on my turns while soaking up the small-mountain charm: no lift lines, friendly ski instructors who volunteered pointers, hamburgers in the lodge for the throwback price of $4.95. At the end of the day, I watched the sun set over a rolling patchwork of farm fields and hardwood forests, before shimmying down Dynamite — a black diamond, by local standards at least — on my last run.

The perfect après-ski spot is just down the mountain, in a home that served as a Revolutionary War-era iron furnace. The 1760 Iron Forge Inn is best known locally as a fine-dining spot, serving classic dishes like lamb loin and duck breast in its formal dining rooms. But the basement has been converted into a casual taproom with equally good but much cheaper bar food.

I ducked to avoid hitting the rough-hewed beams overhead and squeezed into a chair near the open fireplace. Between the fieldstone foundations and antique muskets on the walls, it wasn’t hard to picture patriots quaffing a few pints here back in the day, after routing some redcoats. A half rack of slow-roasted pork ribs ($16) later, I stepped out into the crisp, dead-quiet country night, full moon overhead. My clothes would smell like campfire for days.

Not wanting to miss a view of the Hudson River itself, I got an early start the next morning for Bear Mountain State Park. Hundreds of miles of trails wind through thousands of acres of coastal forest, while a grand old 1915 inn and outdoor skating rink remain reliable draws. A section of the Appalachian Trail climbs steeply to the park’s namesake peak. From the 1,305-foot summit (about an hour’s hike up), I had a clear view of the Hudson River far below, curling its way south all the way to the distant Manhattan skyline.

But this part of the Hudson Valley has its sophisticated side as well. From Bear Mountain, I headed just across county lines to Dia:Beacon ($12 admission), a contemporary art gallery opened in 2003 in a rambling old Nabisco box factory down by the river, not far from a Metro-North commuter rail station.

Inside, the art is minimalist, challenging and, evidently, extremely popular. Throngs of patrons wandered amid heaps of scrap metal, canvases painted pure white and other masterpieces by avant-garde lions like Andy Warhol, Richard Serra and the German painter Blinky Palermo. For modern art greenhorns, however, the building itself is likely to be the star attraction — an enormous industrial space flooded with soft natural light.

Main Street in the town of Beacon offered less abstract charms. Rows of ornate, century-old brick buildings, packed with bookstores, cafes and an uncommon number of bakeries and restaurants, climb a hill above the Hudson. Once a factory town, Beacon seems to have weathered industrial decline and come out the other side with its soul intact — no small feat in this part of New York.

At the end of Main Street, the Fishkill Creek thunders down Beacon Falls on its way to join the Hudson. On a chilly night, a line had formed at the Hop, whose twin focus on craft beer and locally sourced cuisine draws big crowds. I squeezed into the last seat at the bar and ordered a flight of four local beers ($8) and the best brussels sprouts — by a wide margin — I’ve ever had (sautéed in duck fat, drizzled with apple cider syrup, topped with a slab of maple bacon, $14).

Mustachioed guys with growlers were elbowing in for refills. Stylish young couples with little children browsed the takeaway selection of Chimays. It was all starting to feel a bit too much like, yes, Brooklyn. But someone had put a sign above the bar: Hipsters Use Backdoor. And in the air was something a little too raw and gruff for Williamsburg. I knew I was home.

In the mid 1800s, not long after the San Francisco gold rush, deposits were discovered north of the border, in a remote part of British Columbia known as Cariboo Country. Thousands of miners raced in and – though the gold quickly ran out – many of them ended up sticking around, setting up expansive ranches on the dry, rolling hills. Today, the Cariboo is still ranch country, with more horses and cattle per square mile than people in most places. For anyone who’s ever dreamed of the cowboy life – cattle runs, rodeos, big skies and lots of open spaces – its also a chance to get a taste of Canada’s “Wild West.” Dude ranches (yes, those do actually exist) dot the region, offering greenhorn travelers (like me) a chance to get in the saddle. I wrote about a week spent at some of the region’s ranches for the Dallas News.

Saddle up in Canada’s Wild West

By Remy Scalza for the Dallas News
Published July 25, 2014(For the online version of the article on the Dallas News website, click here)

There’s a saying in horse riding: “Fear travels down the reins.” If that’s the case, I’m in a world of trouble. I’ve come to Western Canada’s Cariboo region, dude ranch capital of the country, from my home in nearby Vancouver.

A few hours’ drive north of the city, gleaming condo towers and fusion restaurants give way to sagebrush and canyons. This is cattle country, where city slickers like me come to earn their spurs.

Roughly the size of Maine and cut through with rivers, mountains and dry plateaus, the Cariboo region is home to more than a dozen guest ranches.

Options range from working farms to luxury retreats where more time is spent in the spa than in the saddle.

Horses, of course, are the common denominator. My prior experience adds up to a handful of pony rides as a kid at backyard birthday parties. That’s about to change.

Mounting up

My first stop is Sundance Guest Ranch, a 1,200-acre spread with a 100-strong herd of horses in the semi-desert hills above the broad Thompson River.

Sundance started out as a cattle ranch in 1864, around the time gold fever hit the Cariboo and thousands of miners streamed in hoping to strike pay dirt. Today, the ranch boasts an original 1890s homestead, plus updated motel-style quarters for guests.

He’s just helped me onto the back of a sleepy-eyed horse nicknamed “The Husband Carrier.” While more experienced groups trot on out, we stick behind for a little Horsemanship 101 — how to steer, speed up and, most important, stop.

On top, near a lone Ponderosa pine, the valley opens. The river below shimmers in the setting sun, snaking through a treeless moonscape of canyons and furrowed hills.

Back at the ranch, dinner fare is hardly the chuck wagon variety. I load up on grilled sirloin with merlot reduction and Yukon Gold potatoes, then stake out a seat at the end of a long wooden table alongside a dozen or so fellow dudes. War stories are traded — tales of bucking broncos, runaway horses and worse. After my first real ride, I’m just glad to be in one piece.

Back in the saddle

My next stop is a two-hour drive north, roughly following the route of the old Cariboo Gold Rush Trail. Semi-desert cedes to pine forests, and the air feels a few degrees cooler. Alongside a mile-long, crystal clear mountain lake, I find aptly named Crystal Waters Ranch, a working ranch with a few hundred head of cattle and nearly 100 horses.

Despite the size of the spread, the ranch is an intimate affair, just a few log cabins clustered around the lake shore. Guests come for isolation, superb trout fishing and, of course, exceptional riding.

“We’re surrounded by thousands and thousands of acres of crown land,” meaning government-owned, says wrangler and owner Nicole Guetler, who first came to the Cariboo from Germany after college and got hooked. “You can ride out there forever.”

She helps me onto a mellow horse named Custer, who’s not exactly on his last stand but close enough for my tastes. We take off at a gentle clip into mixed aspen and poplar forest.

Recent rains have swollen forest streams, and when we cross, the horses plunge in nearly to their bellies.

Back at the ranch, farm life is in full swing. We arrive just minutes after two mares have given birth.

The foals shiver in the sun, trying desperately to get to their feet. Finally, one manages to stand for a split second before doing a face plant back in the mud. The mother looks on, lapping him with her big tongue for encouragement.

What really sets the ranch apart is Crystal Waters Lake. I trade the saddle for a kayak and push out. The water is as smooth as glass and just as clear. With the sun dipping low, I paddle out to the middle. Mergansers dive as I approach, and a pair of loons call into the night.

One last ride

On my final day in the Cariboo, I drive west toward a one-of-a-kind ranch on the edge of the snowcapped Marble Mountains.

Upon arrival, I’m ushered up an elegant stairway lined with lotus flowers and smiling Buddhas, through an elaborately carved teak door and onto a bed laid with handmade silk. It’s time for my massage.

Echo Valley Ranch may well be the world’s only Thai-themed dude ranch. Clustered around a towering wooden pagoda straight out of Southeast Asia are tidy little log cabins, a corral with 35 horses and a broad-timbered lodge. There’s also a spa offering Thai massages, not to mention hydrotherapy, aromatherapy and sundry other therapies.

After my treatment, which does wonders after a few days in the saddle, I make my way to the lodge for lunch. Plates of seared albacore tuna done rare are brought out by smiling Thai servers. Next comes soya-ginger marinated halibut and barbecue free-range chicken. I have to resolve not to stuff myself. After all, there’s still one ride left.

“Pairing horses and riders is definitely an art,” says Sannukka Pekkala, a 24-year-old wrangler with long blond hair who’s busy in the corral. “The right horse changes everything.” She thinks for a second, then chooses for me a chestnut quarter horse in the corner named Joker.

He’s the one I’ve been waiting for. A veritable Rolls-Royce compared to my first two horses, Joker has a smooth gait and plenty of pep in his step. Halfway into our ride, when Pekkala asks if we want to run, I’m ready.

For the briefest of moments, the horses break into a full-on gallop. The stride is effortless, a horizontal glide through the landscape. And all at once I get it — that horsey high that seasoned riders know and love, a feeling of moving in harmony with the animal beneath you.

When we finally ride back into Echo Valley, sprinklers are sending arching rainbows of water over the pastures. I hop down, give Joker a pat on the neck and knock the mud off my cowboy boots — a city slicker no more.

A few years ago, I did a story on the Calgary Stampede – a weeklong fair in Calgary, Alberta, with carnival rides, country music and plenty of rodeo. The best bull riders, bronc busters and barrel racers from around the world converge on Calgary to compete for millions of dollars in prize money in what amounts to rodeo’s Super Bowl. It was my first exposure to rodeo live and up close – violent, dangerous, in its own way beautiful.

Recently, Canadian Geographic invited me to cover a very different rodeo story. Each year for the last 60 or so years, the small farming town of Pincher Creek, Alberta (pop. 3685) has held its own rodeo. At stake is considerably less prize money than at the big Calgary Stampede. But the action and the people were, if anything, more exciting and more interesting.

The Real Cowboys of Pincher Creek

By Remy Scalza for Canadian Geographic Travel
Published Summer 2014(For the online version of the article on the Canadian Geographic website, click here.)

BEHIND THE RODEO GROUNDS on the edge of Pincher Creek, a small town in southwestern Alberta at the confluence of highways 6, 507 and 785, cowboys have improvised a locker room. Sitting in the grass, they tape themselves up for another ride, shoring up busted elbows and knees with Ace bandages. Steer wrestlers limber up with squats and jumping jacks, while saddle bronc riders put their saddles in the dirt and jerk back and forth in pantomime of the ride to come.

“It’s pretty hard to explain what it feels like to someone who’s never done it,” says Dustin Flundra, a native of Pincher Creek and, with three Canadian Saddle Bronc Championships to his credit, one of Canada’s more decorated rodeo cowboys. “When things are working, and you’re on a perfect bronc ride, it gets kind of addicting.”

Last night, when the stands here were empty and the stock was out to pasture, Flundra came home. He had been on the road all week, hopscotching between rodeos in Idaho, Washington, British Columbia and Montana. Sometime after dark, his Dodge pickup would have reached a familiar stretch of country at the base of the Rocky Mountains. With the window down, he would have smelled hay and earth. Fifty-metre wind turbines would have stood like ghostly sentinels, stirring in the cool air. Somewhere in the dark sea of fields would have been the lights of a small town, just a few streets set along a swiftly moving creek.

“I’ve probably been to 1,000 rodeos in the last 13 years, but this one is always special for me,” Flundra says. He’s squinting in the August sun now, thumbs hitched into his belt, framing an enormous buckle that reads Canadian Pro Rodeo Assoc. Saddle Bronc Champion. “This is my hometown rodeo. I know just about everybody here. They’ll all be watching.”

UNDERSTANDING THE PINCHER CREEK RODEO, held one weekend each summer for the last 61 years (and on and off well before that), begins with numbers. Pincher Creek has 3,685 residents. Most years, the rodeo fills all of its 1,000 seats. “It’s safe to say it’s the event of the season,” says Farley Wuth, curator of Pincher Creek’s Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village museum and unofficial town historian. Inside his office, shelves are crammed with copies of the Pincher Creek Echo newspaper dating back more than a century. After introducing himself, Wuth, who is stocky with a large moustache, hands me a book with the heft of a family Bible — the 984-page town history. “Labour of love and all that,” he says.

On a hot afternoon before the rodeo kicks off, he takes me out to Main Street, a binder of historical photos tucked under his arm. We walk past a two-screen movie theatre, a Canadian Legion, a Sears catalogue store, two Chinese restaurants, a liquor store and a Sobeys supermarket. Every few minutes, people slow their cars, wave and exchange a few words with Wuth, shielding their eyes from the bright sun with one hand.

“The first competitions date back to the 1890s,” he says, fumbling through his binder for a grainy, black-and-white shot of townsfolk in their Sunday best gathered for a chuckwagon race. “Then in the 1920s, we moved things to the high school over there.” Out on the street, one horse trailer after another rattles by bound for the new rodeo grounds on the edge of town. “You have to understand that some of the ranches around here have been in the same families for five or six generations,” he says. “Rodeo isn’t just some salute to the past. It’s our future.”

BACK AT THE GROUNDS, the smell of grilling burgers and manure hangs in the air. The stands are filling quickly. Seated shoulder to shoulder are old-time ranchers, faces lined from years in the sun; young girls in cowboy hats; bonnet-wearing Hutterites from the colony just outside town and Piikani First Nations members from the reserve up the road. Up at the 4-H concessions, long lines have formed for $1.25 ears of corn and cans of pop and shaved ice flavoured with syrups in neon shades. Little kids, cowboy hats sagging down to their noses, race along the grass in front of the stands, trying to lasso each other.

Rodeo, if you haven’t grown up around it, can seem spectacularly, sometimes shockingly, violent — for horse and bull and steer and calf and no less so for rider. The day starts with bareback. Cowboys try their best to stay on bucking horses for eight seconds: hard enough in itself, but in this case it’s without the benefit of a real saddle. One after another, the animals explode from the confines of their metal chutes. Heads lower, legs rocket back and — in a spasm of terror — all four hoofs clear the ground. It’s hard to believe their muscles and bones can stand the strain. It’s even harder to believe that someone could hold on.

I watch as one cowboy after another is whipped about like a rag doll. The lucky ones hang on until the buzzer. The rest are rudely unseated, flung high into the air only to crash back to the dirt, where they sit, stunned, then dust themselves off. One competitor breaks his leg early in the competition, writhes on the ground, and then is carried off by other cowboys who form a sling with their arms. What motivates bareback riders, steer wrestlers and bull riders to get up and get back on, over and over again, can be a mystery, even for them.

“For me, it’s just about the challenge, I guess,” explains Otys Little Mustache, a steer wrestler from Brocket, a community on the Piikani reserve. Little Mustache, who has shoulderlength black hair spilling from beneath his cowboy hat, is waiting his turn on the edge of the infield. With a broad smile, mirrored sunglasses and a Dodger-blue buttoned-up shirt (but no moustache of any size), he looks equal parts GQ model and cowboy.

“My dad used to steer wrestle, so it kind of runs in the family,” he says. “Only back then, it was hard for people to get a fair shot, you know.” Challenges led First Nations cowboys to form their own rodeo associations in the ’70s, and last year Little Mustache finished second at the Indian National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. Today, however, he’s nervous. “I went to the gym at 10 o’clock this morning just to get the jitters out,” he says.

Minutes later, the jitters don’t show. In a matter of seconds (4.3, to be precise), he has raced alongside a charging steer, leapt off his horse and landed on the animal’s shoulders. In one brutally graceful motion, he plants his heels, wrenches the steer’s horns 180 degrees clockwise and throws the nearly 230-kilogram animal on its back. Little Mustache raises both hands and pumps his fist. Friends and family in the beer tent are hollering and whistling. He collects himself, then breaks off at a trot to join in the celebrating.

DURING A LULL IN THE ACTION, I make my way through the stands, past a pen where enormous bulls glare from behind glassy brown eyes and down to a parking lot at the edge of the agricultural grounds. Inside a fifth-wheel trailer that serves as his home on the road and dressing room, Ash Cooper is anxious: his makeup has smeared. “You’ve got to put baby powder on or it will do that in the hot weather,” says Cooper, a rodeo clown who goes by the stage name CrAsh and wears oversized pants and suspenders with a red-and-white striped Where’s Waldo-style shirt. A former semi-pro hockey player from Saskatchewan, he came to clowning by accident 20 years ago. “I like the spotlight and I thought, ‘That looks like fun,’ ” he says. “Of course, it helped there was a shortage of clowns at the time.”

Cooper closes one eye and paints the lid blue, then repeats with the other. “You definitely don’t do it for the money. It’s the lifestyle you get hooked on.” A typical year sees him criss-crossing the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, performing on rodeo’s biggest stages, including Alberta’s own Calgary Stampede. “But it’s the little rodeos where you feel the crowd,” he says. “These people here remember jokes I made three years ago.” Before I leave, Cooper tells me to pay attention during an upcoming intermission, when he’ll put on a pair of stilts and do a backflip in the middle of the arena. “Broke my back doing that a few years ago, but it always gets the crowd going.”

This time, Cooper lands the flip without incident. Afterward, he sticks around to officiate something called a calf scramble. Two dozen six- to nine-year-olds stampede around the arena, trying to corner a pair of spooked calves and tug ribbons off their tails. With new bikes on the line, the animals don’t stand a chance, and two blonde-haired girls claim the prizes in less than 30 seconds.

The day’s few clouds have burned off now and bright sun bakes the dirt of the infield. Tie-down ropers lasso calves and bind their hooves in a blur, and ladies barrel racers on horseback thunder across the infield, long hair whipping from beneath their hats as they weave through hairpin turns around barrels. From the beer tent, the smells of barbecue — smoke, pork and corn on the cob — rise and sail on the breeze.

It’s near the end of the day when I find Flundra, the hometown favourite, waiting his turn behind the chutes. For someone about to get on a 540-plus-kilogram hunk of tense, rippled muscle named Chicken Hawk, he’s surprisingly calm. “Rodeo’s been good to me. It’s had highs and lows, but everything in life comes with that,” he says. Lately, however, bumps and bruises have been starting to add up. “Tore a meniscus, tore an MCL, dislocated a fibula, broke an elbow, tore a ligament in my elbow, had my head stepped on and ended up with a severe concussion,” he says, pausing to remember if he’s missed anything. “That’s just in the last three years. But doesn’t do you no good to sulk.”

Moments later, the crowd and announcers go quiet as Flundra settles into the saddle. His horse bashes at the steel siding with its hoofs, thrashing in the tight space. When the chute door finally swings open, the animal gives a pair of frantic bucks, hurtling onto the infield. Flundra’s head snaps back; the fringes of his chaps whip through the air. Hundreds of cowboy hats in the stands swivel in time, following each stutter and lurch across the dirt.

But the horse loses enthusiasm, slows and bucks lamely along the fence. Flundra holds on, but his score leaves him out of the running for top honours. “That’s how it works sometimes,” he explains afterward, disappointed but trying not to show it. “All you can do is get back in the truck and head down the road to the next one.”

The 61st annual Pincher Creek rodeo ends at 5 p.m. sharp. By 5:15, hundreds of cars have left the rodeo grounds, crawled along Main Street, paused at the stop sign at Christie Avenue and left the town centre. It’s still the same bright, hot Sunday, but now it’s quiet: no booming announcer’s voice or country music coming from the Horseshoe Pavilion. On Main Street, the two Chinese restaurants are closed. The movie theatre’s doors are locked. Those who aren’t on the highway to the next event are on their way home to make dinner and catch up on chores neglected all weekend because the rodeo was in town.

I think everyone at some point dreams of doing an Africa safari: seeing lions, elephants, rhinos, giraffes – the whole Animal Crackers menagerie – up close and in person. But if you start to research safaris online, you quickly discover that they’re extremely expensive, with a week-long trip for two often approaching the cost of a new car. On a recent trip to Namibia, however, I was able to find a cheaper option – a self-drive, do-it-yourself safari. It ended up being considerably less intimidating than it might sound. I wrote about the highs and lows of the experience for The Wall Street Journal.

An Affordable DIY Safari in Namibia

By Remy Scalza for The Wall Street Journal
Published Feb. 8, 2014(For the online version of the article on The Wall Street Journal website, click here.)

ROADS IN ETOSHA National Park, a wildlife sanctuary in northern Namibia bigger than the state of New Jersey, are almost perfectly flat. There’s little in the way of traffic. Still, it’s not a great idea to read a map at the wheel.

My wife hollered, “Stop!” By the time I hit the brakes and our little rented Volkswagen skidded to a halt, we were 10 feet from a pair of enormous knees. The African bush elephant they belonged to flared his ears and turned one massive eye my way, clearly—and justifiably—annoyed.

The African safari of glossy-brochure fame—luxury lodges, expert guides, the whole Lion King menagerie hamming it up for photos—represents the trip of a lifetime to many travelers. It generally carries a price tag to match that status.

I went looking for something different, and easier on the bank account. I found it in Etosha.

The park sits in the arid northeastern corner of Namibia, a country whose features include parched plains and plateaus, jagged mountains and 100-story red sand dunes that unfold to the Atlantic Coast. Most of its 2.3 million citizens still live in small, tribal villages. Namibia has neither the traditional safari cred of neighboring South Africa nor anywhere near the tourist volume.

But Namibia is also one of Africa’s success stories in terms of stability, infrastructure and conservation. Since the country won its independence from South Africa in 1990, it has set aside nearly half of all its land as protected. Animals once threatened by poaching and habitat loss—including elephants, black rhinos and lions—have reappeared in record numbers.

Nowhere in Namibia is this profusion of wildlife more accessible than in Etosha, which is uniquely set up for independent (i.e., budget-minded) travelers. Its gravel roads are navigable with compact rental cars—no four-wheel drives required. State-run lodges inside the park offer comfortable accommodation at accessible prices (often ridiculously so). Meanwhile, wildlife clusters around more than 30 roadside watering holes, so anyone with a decent pair of binoculars and a $5 road map can track down the better part of the Big Five without a guide.

It does help to have a sense of adventure. At the main southern entrance to the park, a guard in a solitary hut took me through the safety briefing. “You must remain in the car at all times when on the roads,” she said, repeatedly. Considering the thousands of apex carnivores and multi-ton pachyderms roaming inside Etosha, I wasn’t inclined to argue.

Etosha means “great white place” in the language of one of its original inhabitants, Namibia’s Ovambo people. Its central feature is an enormous salt pan, which looks like an ocean that shimmers with heat waves instead of water. All kinds of megafauna come to the fringes to lick salt—lions, rhinos, giraffes, elephants, thundering herds of zebra and antelope. Because vegetation is sparse, even safari novices can spot normally reclusive animals.

Ten miles into the park, however, all we had seen were a few gangly springbok, little gazelles hardly more exotic than your average deer. To find out where the marquee predators were hiding, I made a quick detour to park headquarters, located in Okaukuejo camp, one of several gated rest compounds inside Etosha.

“Check the sightings book,” the receptionist said, barely looking up as she pointed to a tattered notebook near the door. I leafed through the equivalent of a safari cheat sheet, a detailed record of sightings by fellow travelers. The latest tip was less than an hour old: four elephants bathing at a water hole a few miles away.

When we rolled up a few minutes later, they were still knee-deep in the water, spraying and splashing, pulling long drafts from the pond with their trunks then blasting each other. A few dozen zebras waited in the wings, while a giraffe cautiously skirted the water’s edge. We were so close, I had to take the zoom lens off my camera to fit the animals in the frame.

Camps inside Etosha close their gates at sunset, which creeps up fast when you’re dashing from water hole to water hole. After a day on the road, we hustled to beat the sinking sun to Halali camp, our stop for the night, following a cloud of dust whipped up by other tardy drivers.

Operated by the Namibian government, Etosha’s camps generally don’t offer the private-plunge-pool luxury of other safari destinations. (The exception, Onkoshi camp, does not serve self-drive travelers.) But the lodging is far from bare-bones. In fact, the term “camp” is rather misleading.

Accommodation ranges from comfortable double rooms in low-slung lodges to private thatched-roof chalets perched above water holes. Camp restaurants serve rustic but exceedingly fresh food, with menus highlighting some of the same (non-endangered) sort of game seen in the park. Prices start at less than $75 a person per night—a 10th of what some of the private lodges outside the park charge.

Inside Halali, families gathered around campers; there were tidy bungalows and even a few bush chalets on a hillside. As safari camps go, it was more Holiday Inn than Hilton. But the rooms were immaculate, with hot water and air conditioning, and the dinner buffet was jammed with the kind of exotic meats—oryx, springbok, kudu and ostrich—adventurous eaters swoon over in big cities.

Not to mention the view, which was hard to beat. Before the light faded completely, we climbed to a protected ridge above a water hole. Below, two elephants, a mother and a very young calf, were drinking, their profiles silhouetted by an extravagantly red sky. I pulled a couple bottles of local Windhoek Lager from my backpack—not quite the classic safari sundowner of gin and tonic, but close enough.

The following days brought encounters with hundreds more elephants, zebras that blocked the road and stared at our car, giraffes bumping necks in elegant mating rituals and ostriches sunning with their wings spread, not to mention hordes of herbivores, from kudu to oryx. Each water hole along the way proved a separate stage, with a separate drama unfolding. Mainly, we had the show to ourselves, passing maybe a few dozen cars all week.

But, there remained the pressing matter of lions. While everyone I bumped into as we worked our way from camp to camp had seen them (one sightings-book entry: “LIONS HAVING SEX!!!”), we had struck out. For all the virtues of a DIY safari—the sense of discovery, the solitude, the savings—at times a guide would have been nice.

On the last morning in Etosha, I found our savior in the office at Namutoni camp, on the easternmost edge of the park. A whitewashed fort rising from the dry bush, Namutoni was built by German colonizers in 1902, promptly burned down by locals, then rebuilt with better defenses in 1906. Today it’s home to palm-fringed swimming pools where little kids splash and chatter in Afrikaans, and a steakhouse that serves game and decent sausages, the latter a culinary legacy of those colonizers.

In the camp office, I learned that the day’s guided group safaris—on which lion sightings are nearly guaranteed—were booked solid. I was getting desperate when I saw an off-duty guide on the couch, practically winking at me from behind a newspaper. A deal was quickly and quietly hammered out: $400 Namibian (about $40) for a two-hour private tour.

“We’ve had reports of a lioness with cubs,” said the guide, Samuel Hilundwa, who turned out to be a veteran tracker. “But it’s far. I’ll have to drive fast.” As we barreled down gravel roads, whizzing past flora and fauna, Mr. Hilundwa offered rapid-fire commentary: Giraffes get darker as they age, lions spend 20 hours a day napping, a herd of zebra is called a dazzle.

We were still lion-less an hour later when Mr. Hilundwa spotted a pair of trucks pulled to the side of the road. He braked, rolled down his window and shouted something in Afrikaans to the other drivers. “There! 11 o’clock,” he said, pointing furiously. I squinted into the distance, my one chance to spot a lion quickly slipping away.

Then I saw her racing through the grass, one terrifyingly oversize house cat. I could make out the rounded ears, the huge paws. The lioness slinked along, low to the ground. In the distance, a herd of springbok raised their heads, picked up the scent and bolted.

The lioness broke into a sprint. “She’s hunting,” Mr. Hilundwa said, smiling. As I raised my binoculars for a better look, he offered a gentle warning. “You have to understand,” he said, “this may not be as pretty as National Geographic.”

Getting There: International flights land at Hosea Kutako International Airport outside Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. DIY travelers should rent a car there for the five-hour drive north to Etosha National Park’s Anderson Gate. Admission for foreigners is $80 NAD (about $8) a day for adults.

Staying There: Comfortable accommodation is available inside the park at a network of state-run camps (from around $100 per person per night for two-person bush chalets, etoshanationalpark.co.za). There are higher-end lodging options just outside the park gates, including Ongava Lodge, which has 13 chalets and its own reserve where rhinos and lions roam (from around $750 per person per night,wilderness-safaris.com).

Eating There: Inside Etosha, camp restaurants serve palatable, if uninspired, German cuisine, including schnitzels and spaetzle, as well as game steaks like oryx, kudu and springbok. Packed lunches can be ordered for the road.

When to Go: Most travelers visit during Namibia’s dry season, May through October, when wildlife congregates around water holes. But visits during the November-to-April rainy season are rewarded with lush scenery and an abundance of birds, including thousands of migrating flamingos.

What to Pack: Be prepared for hot, dusty conditions during the day and occasionally chilly nights. The standard safari ensemble—breathable pants with zip-off legs; a lightweight, long-sleeved shirt; and broad-rimmed hat to shield against the sun—works well. Consider investing in a decent set of binoculars.

Namibia is one of the few places in the world where the populations of threatened species – from cheetahs and lions to black rhinos and elephants – are actually increasing. A good part of that success has to do with the country’s unique communal conservancy program. Local tribal people are given the authority to manage their wildlife resources as they see fit and keep the profits. Experience has shown them that big mammals are worth a lot more alive – as a draw for tourists – than dead.I had an opportunity to visit several successful conservancies earlier this year, as part of a story for The New York Times.

In Namibia, Conservation and Tourism Intersect

By Remy Scalza for The New York Times
Published Nov. 3, 2013(To read the online version of the article on The New York Times website, click here.)

Uamunikaije Tjivinda squatted in the sand and threw a few strips of dried giraffe meat into a pot of boiling water. Like many Himba women in the arid, northwestern part of Namibia called Kaokoland, she wore sandals, a goatskin skirt and little else. Her skin and long, plaited hair were a striking rust-red, rubbed with ocher dug from the earth.

From nearby hills, other women with young children converged, standing quietly around Ms. Tjivinda’s domed hut, their eyes downcast. Out of the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser, my wife and I unpacked gifts brought on the advice of our guide — cornmeal, tea, sugar and other supplies hard to find here.

Though no longer a novelty for these women, these sorts of encounters with tourists are still new enough to be awkward. Only when the food came out did they smile and start to talk.

“The conservancy has been good for us,” Ms. Tjivinda said in the local Otjihimba dialect, which our guide translated. “Wildlife are cared for like our own livestock, and money from tourism goes into our conservancy bank account.” Goats wandered by as the women sat down to braid hair. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw a small Himba girl, her hand wrist-deep in the sugar bag we brought. She raised a fistful to her mouth and swallowed.

For nearly two decades, Namibia, a country twice the size of California but with just 2.1 million residents, has been part of an ambitious experiment in both community tourism and wildlife conservation, known as communal conservancies. “The idea was to fight poaching by restoring control over wildlife to the local people,” said John Kasaona, the director of Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation, the primary N.G.O. behind the initiative.

In 1996, groundwork laid by the organization paved the way for new laws giving tribal communities — who previously had limited rights to resources on communal lands — the ability to form conservancies and self-manage their wildlife. “We wanted to show them that they could benefit financially from keeping these animals alive, in particular from wildlife tourism,” said Mr. Kasaona, who would spend years canvassing the countryside, explaining the model village by village. “Try convincing people who were made these same promises years ago by a colonial regime and then robbed of their land,” he said. “At first, no one trusted us.”

In the years since, the plan has been a resounding — and rare — success story for African wildlife. Seventy-nine conservancies now cover a full 20 percent of Namibia. Populations of desert lions, desert elephants and black rhinos, all threatened with extinction in the early ’90s, have increased several times over, while poaching has plummeted. (One rhino was poached in Namibia last year, compared with 668 in neighboring South Africa.) Meanwhile, conservancies throughout the country have teamed up with international tourism operators, giving ordinary travelers like me unprecedented access to both animals and local culture.

But an increase in wildlife — and tourists — has brought a new and unexpected set of challenges. “We’re having some problems with our own success,” said Mr. Kasaona, who grew up herding goats in Kaokoland and whose family members still live a pastoral life there. “As we say, lions and cattle aren’t always best friends.”

Nearly half of all Namibia’s conservancies, and many of the country’s most ambitious community tourism projects, are in the northern Kunene region (which includes Kaokoland), an expanse of dry mountains and valleys the size of Greece but with fewer than 90,000 inhabitants. As we drove north in a rented four-wheel drive, gravel roads gave way to “Kunene highways,” rutted tracks that thread through desert, cross dry river beds and sometimes disappear altogether. Against this harsh backdrop, conservancies have logged one of their greatest successes, the return of the endangered black rhino.

“These animals were almost completely wiped out by poachers 25 years ago,” said Aloysius Waterboer, a guide at Desert Rhino Camp, a tent lodge located in Damaraland, traditional home of the Damara people. We were bumping along in an open safari car, hoping to spot one of the roughly 30 rhinos that now live in this area. Mr. Waterboer slowed the vehicle and studied the riot of zebra, oryx and elephant footprints in the sand, looking for rhino tracks.

The camp, a cluster of eight tent chalets, sits alone on 1,700 square miles of rocky hills and desert scrub leased from area conservancies, who are also 40 percent shareholders in the project. Nearly 90 percent of employees, including Mr. Waterboer, are drawn from local communities. Many of the expert rhino trackers on staff are former poachers themselves. “If you’re a poacher, all you really want is to feed your family,” Mr. Waterboer explained. “So it made sense to put them on the payroll.”

With night falling on the desert, we rolled into a dry riverbed, then stopped sharply. “He hasn’t noticed us yet,” Mr. Waterboer said, pointing to a gray speck in the distance. Suddenly, the rhino’s tail flicked up in alarm and he raised his head to sniff the air. Seen through binoculars, the 8-year-old male, identifiable from a distinctive chip in one of his horns, looked car-size and prehistoric.

It was dark when we returned to camp, and guides made a point of walking guests to their tents: a desert lion, another species rescued from the brink, had been spotted outside staff quarters the previous night. “Rhinos are very well accepted by the locals now,” Mr. Waterboer said. “The lions are a bit more complicated.”

The next day, we set out for lion country. Reaching camps north of Damaraland requires either pricey bush flights or, in our case, a willingness to endure bone-jarring rides along bad roads. Remoteness rewarded, however. In the conservancies we drove through, desert elephants grazed on acacia trees and Angolan giraffes stared as we passed. But resurgent wildlife presents its own hurdles. “It’s a constant competition between the livestock and the wildlife for resources,” said Dux Tjipombo, a guide at the Purros Community Campsite, a small conservancy-run campground reached after a half-day’s drive. “The fact that we haven’t got any rain this year only makes things worse.”

Beside a dry tributary of the Hoarusib River, we turned off-road. Nearby, farmers had spotted a pride of eight lions, suspected of killing two cattle earlier in the week. “You have to understand that cattle are wealth here,” Mr. Tjipombo said. “That’s like someone robbing your bank.”

Philip Stander, a Namibian biologist who has dedicated his career to protecting the country’s desert lions, spends 350 days a year in the bush as part of his one-man Desert Lion Conservation Project. Since 1998, he has watched the population of these unique animals, which can go for months and even years without drinking water while obtaining hydration from the meat they eat, grow from 20 to nearly 150. “The question,” he said, “is what happens next.”

His Web site is full of case histories of desert lions collared and tracked for years, only to be shot by villagers. Conservancy funds are set aside to compensate farmers for losses and discourage revenge killings, but human-wildlife conflicts are rising. “I understand why they retaliate, and they have every legal right to,” he said. “I just sometimes wish we had a chance to intervene first.”

Back on the river, the lions were nowhere to be found. We pushed on past the last town on the map, just a circle of huts with sheet metal roofs. Mirages glimmered in the distance, while a hot wind whipped up the dusty soil. The inhospitable terrain marked the edge of Kaokoland, one of the wildest, least populated parts of Namibia and the home of what may be its most unusual community tourism experiment.

The first guest camp owned by the Himba people, one of the country’s last truly seminomadic tribes, sits on a mountaintop inside the Orupembe conservancy. Opened in 2011, Etambura Tented Lodge — five comfortable tents with thatched roofs, concrete floors and even indoor bathrooms — is hundreds of miles from the nearest paved road or village on the electrical grid. Many of its Himba owners reside in the surrounding valleys, herding goats and cattle, and living in dung-and-stick huts, as they have for centuries.

More than wildlife, it is these people whom travelers come to see. And unlike tensions with animals, the challenges to isolated tribal communities posed by the conservancy model are just beginning to be acknowledged.

“Before the camp opened, there were almost no tourists in this part of the country,” said Kaku Musaso, a camp manager brought in from the city of Opuwo who, like many modern Himba women, wears Western clothes and speaks impeccable English with a British accent. “It was rare to see any white people here.”

Early one morning, Ms. Musaso guided us by foot along a rocky ridge, then down a steep slope to a watering hole. Hundreds of goats clustered around a shoulder-deep depression dug in an otherwise dry river bed, where a young boy was scooping buckets of water into a wooden trough. In the shade of a shepherd’s tree, six Himba women and at least a dozen children gathered. The ocher from their bare bodies had stained the rocks they sat on red.

Six months ago the women received their first visitors. By the time we got there, they knew the routine: Blankets were unrolled and topped with woven baskets and colorful necklaces and bracelets made of beads and ostrich bone. After Ms. Musaso bargained on our behalf, we handed over the equivalent of $20 in Namibian bills, which the women rolled into tubes, wrapped in scraps of plastic and tucked into their skirts. I asked what they used the money for. From a small bundle, one produced a brightly colored cellophane package showing a picture of a young woman with long, regal tresses: synthetic hair extensions, made in South Africa.

HOW EXTREME?

Rankings are from 1 (not at all) to 4 (very).

Remoteness: 3

Northern Namibia is among the last true wilderness areas in southern Africa, with few paved roads; four-wheel-drive vehicles and bush flights are the only reliable ways to get around.

Creature Discomforts: 2

Long drives over very rough roads can be taxing, but accommodations at camps and lodges — even in remote locations — are generally comfortable, with running water and electricity.

Physical Difficulty: 1

Because of the distances involved, much of the trip is simply spent driving; getting out of the car to stretch your legs may be your main exercise.

Having grown up on the East Coast (or “back East,” as Canadians say), I’m easily impressed when it comes to mountains. Show me a rocky peak, crystal-clear mountain lake or snow-capped anything and I’ll stop and stare. But Jasper, Alberta, is a whole other story. Tucked inside a national park in the Canadian Rockies, the town is circled by a wall of jagged mountain. Caribbean-blue glacial lakes dot the valleys and the silt-grey Athabasca River, highway for generations of fur traders, runs through it all. I explored Jasper recently for the Vancouver Sun.

An Alpine Shangri-La Minus the Crowds

By Remy Scalza for the Vancouver Sun(For the newspaper version of the article, click here: Alpine Shangri-La)

With 300 black bears and 200 grizzlies calling western Canada’s Jasper National Park home, running into one isn’t as much a possibility as a fait acomplit. But even from the reassuring safety of a car, the first encounter can be a jolt.

The particular black bear beside my passenger window right now is man-sized: six feet long, probably 300 pounds. Cuddly – in a way – except for the long, curving incisor peeking out his open mouth. He raises his head, waves his nose in the air and looks my direction.

For Chuck Cantlie – naturalist, 29-year Jasper resident and no stranger to these encounters – this is a teaching moment. Calmly, he guides me through Bear Safety 101. “A bear can turn on you in a heartbeat and outrun a racehorse,” he says. Outside, our subject is close enough now to admire his muscled linebacker’s neck and hear his paws thrashing through the wiry grass beside the highway. “Rule number one is don’t run.”

The Rocky Mountains – which stretch in a ragged band of serrated peaks from New Mexico up into Western Canada – are a stubbornly wild place. And one of the wildest spots happens to be just across the British Columbia border in central Alberta. In the mountain town of Jasper, geography and history have conspired to preserve what comes close to an alpine Shangri-La: peaks and glacial lakes to rival the best of the Rockies, minus – for now – the crowds. [Read more…]

I moved to Vancouver years ago, but until recently I didn’t realize I lived next door to a Hollywood legend. In the timeless 1981 action flick Rambo, Sylvester Stallone goes on a rampage in a ruggedly beautiful mountain town, blowing it to smithereens. That town is Hope, British Columbia, an otherwise unassuming pit stop on the edge of the Cascade Mountains. I poked around Hope recently for this article published in British Columbia Magazine.

Finding Hope

By Remy Scalza for British Columbia Magazine(For the magazine version with photos, click here: Finding Hope)

The first face to greet me when I walk into the tiny Hope Museum on a sunny spring afternoon is Sly Stallone’s – staring back with a fierce snarl. He’s carrying an automatic weapon of considerable size and flexing his pecs on a vintage movie poster for Rambo: First Blood.

“What can I say? He brings in the crowds,” says Inge Wilson, the friendly manager of the museum and visitor centre. It turns out Hope – the otherwise law-abiding community at the confluence of the mighty Fraser and Coquihalla Rivers in southwestern British Columbia – is the very same town Rambo wiped off the map in the 1982 action movie. The gas station he blew up, the sheriff’s office he blasted and the canyon walls he clung to for dear life now highlight a popular walking tour.

“Of course, we’re a lot more than that,” clarifies Wilson, who moved to Hope with her husband fresh out of university nearly 30 years ago. “If you want to enjoy small town life and outdoor recreation, this is the place.” She’s right. Often dismissed as a highway pit stop for travelers bound for interior B.C., Hope – on closer inspection – proves anything but. [Read more…]

If you’ve heard of Whistler, the mountain town in British Columbia, it’s probably for the skiing. But Whistler has aspirations of being more than just a magnet for downhill enthusiasts. Taking a page out of Aspen’s book, it fancies itself an emerging center of food, wine and culture. So, once a year, the town throws a big, 10-day party of nearly non-stop, over-the-top eating and drinking. I checked out the festivities recently for Canadian Geographic Travel magazine and also handled the photography for the article.

Eat. Play. Repeat.

Story and photography by Remy Scalza for Canadian Geographic Travel(For the magazine version with photos, click here: Eat Play Repeat)

Inside the kitchen of Araxi Restaurant + Bar in Whistler’s Village Square, it’s the calm before the storm. On a crisp Wednesday afternoon in November, executive chef James Walt has come in early to prepare for a meal two nights away. “Expectations are extremely high,” he says, looking up from straining jus for a Wagyu beef cheek. “The type of people who come to Big Guns know their stuff.”

One of Canada’s premier chefs — not to mention good buddies with Gordon Ramsay — Walt is not easily intimidated. But then he’s not preparing for any ordinary dinner. A seven-course, $250-a-plate affair, Big Guns is the culinary climax of Cornucopia, the gastronomic highlight of the year in a town that loves to eat nearly as much as it loves to ski.

For a week or so each fall, gourmands assemble in the Whistler mountains for a celebration of food and wine that would leave Bacchus blushing. Five-, seven- and 10-course dinners are de rigueur. Gala tastings showcase hundreds of wines. Brunches are champagne-paired and afternoon tea comes with martinis. After dark, even party-hardy Whistler is stretched to new extremes with swanky fetes that carry on deep into the autumn night.

In Walt’s kitchen, stockpots are bubbling. Cooks crowd in, clamouring for his attention. It’s my cue to go, but before I do, the chef lets me in on his secret weapon for the big dinner. “White Alba truffles,” he says, raising an eyebrow conspiratorially. “The real deal.” Truffles, of course, are a foodie’s best friend. White Alba truffles — so rare they wholesale for upward of $7,000 a kilo — are the crème de la crème. “It’s gonna blow them away,” he says. [Read more…]

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About Remy Scalza

Remy Scalza is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Vancouver, Canada. His stories and photos appear in The New York Times, Washington Post, Canadian Geographic and other outlets. Read More…